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While the CDC still doesn't know the cause of AFM, the risk factors, long-term effects, or why the number of cases spiked beginning in 2014, the agency has learned the following:

•Most patients are children.

•The patients’ symptoms have been most similar to complications of infection with certain viruses, including poliovirus, non-polio enteroviruses, adenoviruses, and West Nile virus.

•All of the AFM cases have tested negative for poliovirus.

•Enteroviruses most commonly cause mild illness. They can also cause neurologic illness, such as meningitis, encephalitis, and AFM, but these are rare.

•CDC has tested many different specimens from AFM patients for a wide range of pathogens (germs) that can cause AFM. To date, no pathogen (germ) has been consistently detected in the patients’ spinal fluid; a pathogen detected in the spinal fluid would be good evidence to indicate the cause of AFM since this condition affects the spinal cord.

•The increase in AFM cases in 2014 coincided with a national outbreak of severe respiratory illness among people caused by enterovirus D68 (EV-D68). Among the people confirmed with AFM, CDC did not consistently detect EV-D68 in every patient. During 2015, CDC did not receive information about large EV-D68 outbreaks in the United States, and laboratories reported only limited EV-D68 detections to CDC’s National Enterovirus Surveillance System (NESS). During 2016, CDC was informed of a few localized clusters in the United States. Learn more about EV-D68

"People who think they know it all, are annoying to those of us who really do".... Pyro Bob

"Even if Trump didn't pay Russian hookers to pee on one another to defile a bed the Obamas once slept on it sounds like something he would do and that's all that matters." DemocratSinceBirth, Wed Jan 11, 2017, 09:32 AM

"Enemy. The word you are looking for is enemy. When the ideals of someone are antithetical to yours, you can say the word "enemy". DUmmy ret5hd Fri Aug 24, 2018, 05:10 PM

I don't know what is expected of the CDC? An immediate cure? They are researching the virus and traditional research methods are not yielding the answers they need to find a treatment for the disease.

They don't think it's being spread person to person because it's not spreading within families. My dad had polio as a kid, his siblings never got it. He never went to the hospital for treatment, his parents kept him home, so his brother was exposed.

I'm not a scientist, but it sounds like a mutated virus (obviously not polio, because they tested for that), or one that is in the process of mutation.